How to host a website

The four pieces

• A domain — the address people type. Rented yearly from a registrar. A .in runs roughly ₹500–900 a year, a .com ₹900–1,500.
• Hosting — the server that stores your files and answers requests. From ₹49 a month for shared hosting.
• DNS — the lookup that connects the two, so the domain resolves to the server.
• An SSL certificate — encrypts the connection and gives you the padlock. Free.

You can buy the domain and the hosting from different companies. Plenty of people do.

Which type of hosting to pick

The honest answer for almost every first site is shared hosting. The rest exist for specific problems:

• Shared hosting — your site shares a server with others. Cheapest, managed for you, fine into the tens of thousands of visitors a month.
• WordPress hosting — shared hosting tuned for WordPress, with caching and automatic updates. Worth it if the site is WordPress.
• Cloud hosting — dedicated resources that scale. For stores and applications where an outage costs money.
• VPS — your own virtual server with root access. For developers who want to run their own stack.
• Dedicated / VDS — pinned physical cores. For databases and workloads that cannot tolerate contention.

Starting small is not a mistake you have to undo painfully — upgrading is a support ticket, not a rebuild.

Why the server location matters in India

Distance is latency, and for pages built per visitor it is not something caching fixes. From a connection in Pune we measured about 60 ms to a server in Singapore and about 245 ms to one in Virginia, paid on every round trip before your site has done any work at all. To Mumbai it was under 5 ms, and the figures for other Indian cities tell the same story.

Two practical consequences: cheap overseas hosting often turns out to be the reason a site feels slow, and "free hosting" almost always means an overseas shared box with no support. If you are selling to Indians, host in India.

Worth checking before you buy: where the data centre physically is, whether invoices carry GST for input tax credit, and whether support answers during Indian hours.

The order to do it in

• 1. Register the domain.
• 2. Buy hosting and note the nameservers in the welcome email.
• 3. Point the domain at the hosting.
• 4. Wait for DNS, then issue the SSL certificate.
• 5. Install WordPress or upload your files.
• 6. Force HTTPS, set permalinks, and put a backup schedule in place.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones with a wait in them. Everything else is minutes.

What it actually costs

A working business website in India, first year:

• Domain — ₹500–1,500
• Shared hosting — from ₹49/mo
• SSL — free
• WordPress and a decent theme — free, or ₹4,000–6,000 for a premium theme

So the first year of a self-built site is the domain plus twelve months of hosting, with a premium theme the only large optional extra. The costs that surprise people later are renewal rates that differ from the introductory price, and paid add-ons for backups or SSL — which is why we print renewal rates next to every plan and include both.